


Late Once More (A Crowley-Shaped Hole)

by EldunariWitch



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel Wings, Aziraphale and Crowley are in love somewhere between platonic and romantic, Aziraphale experiences dissociation and depression, Canon Continuation, Depression, Discussion of Architecture, Dissociation, Five Stages of Grief, Gratuitous Hamlet references, Grief/Mourning, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, References to Shakespeare, Super sad!, Taking the name of God in vain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-10 14:58:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19507156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EldunariWitch/pseuds/EldunariWitch
Summary: Crowley dies at the airbase, and Aziraphale's grief nearly kills him. An exploration of the stages of grief as Aziraphale experiences them, and how he lives alone in the city they used to share.This is going to be really long and really sad, so please either buckle up for a wild ride or start looking elsewhere if you're hoping for a happy ending.





	1. Denial

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hoping to have five chapters, one for each stage, so I'm not sure how long they're going to be or how often I'll update!

The four of Them faced off against the four gaunt horsepeople, ablaze in their Sunday finery. It was just the kind of elegance perfect for the end of the world. Anathema and Newton watched anxiously from the sidelines; Madame Tracy, recently reduced to one consciousness, wavered on her feet, and Shadwell gripped the Thundergun with white knuckles. Aziraphale and Crowley and the Antichrist Himself rocked back and forth on their heels waiting for the hammer to fall. A growling silence fell over them as War and Pepper stepped into the circle.

Pepper lunged for the sword at the same instant that War leapt forward, knocking her back with a cruel blow to the temple. She fell to the pavement, cowering under the unwoman smiling down at her. War stepped forward and pressed the very tip of the blade to her cheek, pricking her with a minute flick and watching one drop of blood well up and bead on the shining metal. She lifted it up and let the blood run down the groove of the sword, turning it this way and that in the oppressive summer heat. No one took a breath. All eyes were on the gleaming blade and the thing holding it.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" No one spoke. "This sword has never been used, you know." War winked down at Pepper and turned to face the crowd. "This is the first blood ever shed at the end of the world. But it will not be the last." Time slowed down, crawling along with the beat of Aziraphale's heart. _Thump_. War turned to the Principality holding the hand of a little boy, holding the hand of a demon. Her smile widened. _Thump_. The drop of blood rolled down the gutter of the blade and was absorbed into the hilt. It glinted in the light of the sunset. Aziraphale had never known fear like this. _Thump_. War stepped forward, whipping the blade up and forward. _Thump_. It pierced the black Egyptian linen of Crowley's suit. It slithered right through into his heart and out the other side. Crowley dropped the tire iron with a terrible clang, his hands convulsing at his sides. Red blood sluiced off the blade, splattering onto the tarmac and Crowley gasped wetly. It was an awful sound, rasping and terrified. His hands jerked up, struggling to close around the hilt of the sword in his chest. He choked and blood dripped out of his mouth, staining his hands. He stared dumbly down as if he could not believe what was happening, and War kept smiling. His hands clenched weakly around the blade, cutting his fingers with desperation, but it was far too late. War shoved him backwards. Crowley was dead before he hit the ground.

He crumpled backwards, knocking his head on the tarmac. Aziraphale had already rushed to him, to catch him, to save him, but he had fallen before he could do anything. One more time, he had been too late. The last vestiges of animal instinct drained out of him as his shredded heart pumped blood thickly through his teeth, seeping out from his chest and forming one last terrible halo around him as he died on the tarmac. There were no last words, no goodbye. There had been something, and now there was nothing.

Crowley's glassy eyes stared up to Heaven, as golden as they had ever been. His pupils had dilated in death and he had the same love in his eyes as the first time he had met Aziraphale on the Eastern Gate. He looked nearly healthy, but for the red smear on his mouth and the cuts on his head from the fall. Aziraphale was no longer in control of his own body, and he was forced to watch from some distant corner of his mind as he closed the demon's eyes. It had all faded to background noise, and his world was over.

The fighting continued behind him, the Them having miraculously gained back the upper hand due to a strategic shin kick from Pepper, and in several long minutes it subsided. The horsepeople were gone and all that was left was the wind whistling over the airbase. Beezlebub and Gabriel took their leave, their respective charges obviously occupied. Slowly, Anathema and Newton walked away, the children kicked up their bike stands and took off somberly into the dusk, and Madame Tracy left with Shadwell on the motorbike, its roar sacrilegious in the oppressive presence of Aziraphale's grief.

Aziraphale was all alone, kneeling on the pavement and cradling Crowley's body, silent tears running down his face and dropping into the pool of blood. He still smelled like himself, the aftershave still lingering on his stubble and the collar of his suit. But all the hard muscle had gone slack, and his beautiful eyes would never open again. Aziraphale curled over Crowley, holding him with both arms and weeping. After several minutes, Aziraphale noticed that Crowley's body was beginning to heat up. For an unbelievable second, Crowley's body was warm again, like it used to be, but then the heat grew more intense and his skin began to glow. His bones were outlined in dark relief under the orange glow of his skin, as though he were being lit up from the inside. Then the hair on his arms began to burn, and the blood-stained lapels on Aziraphale's coat were singed, and then Crowley's body glowed with unholy light and with a rush of wind he was reduced to ash. Aziraphale clutched at his shoulders, trying desperately to hold his friend down, but the wind took him, the natural exorcism having been too much for his human vessel. Aziraphale had read about this, but he had never seen it happen, and he had hoped he never would.

The last vestiges of the light faded away, leaving only faint traces of ash, a smell of sulphur, and the tang of blood in Aziraphale's mouth. Numbly, he got to his feet, only now becoming aware of the cramp in his legs, the shaking in his hands, and the pounding of his heart. There was a thick lump in his throat that felt like it would kill him soon if he didn't cry, but Aziraphale didn't make a sound. He turned around, expecting, hoping, to see some divine messenger come to kill him. But there was no one there excepting the asphalt and the charred fragments of the Bentley. He stooped and picked up the tire iron Crowley had dropped, hefting it in his hand. He stared down at it, the last thing Crowley had ever touched. He hadn't even been holding him when he died.

With a deep breath, Aziraphale willed his wings into existence. Their white plumage was terribly clean against the whole awful scene. Aziraphale's suit was stained with Crowley's blood, so much of it that it was more red than white. The rest was burnt and torn, flecked all over with ash and motor oil.

He couldn't be dead. He simply couldn't. Crowley had just been Inconveniently, albeit Tragically, Discorporated, and soon he would be back. In a day, a week, Aziraphale would even wait a month. Soon enough, Crowley would come knocking at the bookshop, and their lives would be back on track. But the strain of his muscles in the heavy summer air told him otherwise, that he was flying home with his one true friend's blood on his clothes, and he would never, ever, be coming back. Aziraphale had been given that sword by the Metatron itself, and he had been told personally to protect the Garden from anything, alive or dead, that dared to cross his path. It had been forged in the fires of the first Day and it was the first thing that had ever tainted Water, cold as death and sharp as ice. That sword could, and would, kill anything it touched, permanently and effectively. God had made this sword Herself to kill demons, and finally, it had.

Tears stung the corners of Aziraphale's eyes as they formed and froze. He flew even higher, ice crystals gathering on the edges of his wings and making it harder to fly, but Aziraphale pushed himself until he rose above the clouds and he saw the lights of London glittering like a spider far off in the distance. No small part of him imagined that he would be Icarus tonight, that God would strike him down for his arrogance and his vanity. For loving a demon. For walking away from the End of the World and the Divine Plan. Soon, Aziraphale knew, he would be put down like a stray dog, but not before he had suffered a love and loss six thousand years in the making.

A dull pain washed over him, forcing him back to the same awful corner of his mind. His wings moved ceaselessly on their own, and the pain didn't register to Aziraphale as he neared London. The clouds buffeted him this way and that, but still he forced himself to reach his apartment, to reach his bed, to finally, blissfully, sleep. The streetlamps of London played over his eyes, sharper than ever before on this clear night, but Aziraphale did not care that he would be noticed. He did not heed the warnings Heaven loved to give him, to never let himself be seen for anything other than the limits of his vessel by the human populace. For once in his long life, he forgot the inexorable churning of the printing presses far below in the brownstone buildings. He forgot the cellular phones snapping pictures of his flight, coat snapping out behind him like a secondary pair of vestigial wings. He forgot anything beyond the strain in his wings, the cold air on his cheeks, and the terrible dark expanse of his own mind. Crowley, Crowley, Crowley, Aziraphale thought to himself, but he forced the afternoon deep down until he forgot why he was saying the name.

It had occurred to Aziraphale that his bookshop was gone, right along with everything else of worth in his life. He couldn't bear to see another corpse today, so he flew to Crowley's flat instead, low over the city with tears in his eyes. Aziraphale found himself on the doorstep to Crowley's apartment with no memory of how he had gotten there. All he knew was that his wings were drooping with exhaustion and he was holding the key to the flat. Crowley had given it to him months ago, after it was just too inconvenient to pretend that either of them had calling hours, and its cold weight in Aziraphale's hand almost brought him to his knees.

He unlocked the door, stumbled inside. The flat was all dark slate and granite, hard edges and unforgiving Brutalism. Aziraphale had always preferred to call it Heroism, though it irked Crowley to no end. There were no lights on, but Aziraphale knew the layout of the place as if it were broad daylight. Slowly, he forced himself to move through the rooms, stopping himself from running his hand along the sleek lines of the furniture, because that would mean that Crowley was gone. Crowley couldn't be gone, he was just away, just away.

He took a bottle of bourbon off a passing cabinet with a heavy hand and stumbled forward until he found himself at the bedroom door, pushing it open. The comforter was still thrown across the bed, disturbed from the last time Crowley had slept in it. That had been over a week ago, since Crowley had taken to living out of the bookshop while trying to come up with a plan to stop the Apocalypse. There was no dust anywhere, but the room had never felt more desolate. Aziraphale let his coat drop off his shoulders. The linen on his skin was still cold from the long flight.

He let himself sink down onto the bed, the creak of it loud in the silent room. He shivered and lay back. Aziraphale hoped just this once that he might sleep, perchance even dream. The world was so empty and awful, but with a dream he could see Crowley again, touch his shoulder and call him _Dear_ one more time. He would hardly have been gone at all.

But when Aziraphale closed his eyes, all he could see was the blood dripping off the sword. Crowley falling backwards to the pavement. The look in his eyes as the light went out of them. His hand, limp on the ground. Oh, how Aziraphale had rushed to him, had held that hand, but it had been too late. He had always been too late.

Although he grumbled and moaned, Hamlet had always been Crowley's favorite. The six thousand-odd years on Earth had not been kind to either of them, and Crowley had shaped the play with a distant and careful hand, nudging the words in Hamlet's mouth so they resembled his own. On the opening night, they had sat together on the roof of the Globe, legs dangling over the edge into thin air, and Crowley mouthed all the words to himself. Now Aziraphale understood why he had remembered all the lines. Never before had he wished as fervently that his too, too solid flesh would melt and resolve itself into a dew. The wrongful death of his closest family colored his every motion, the knowledge that the world would keep turning, out of joint as it was, on its axis and nothing could ever be done to avenge the fallen. Hamlet and Aziraphale both found themselves in lockstep with the grinding machinery of untouchable bureaucracy, unable to shake themselves loose for fear of being dragged into inaction or deep into the dark waters of sorrow.

Somehow Aziraphale kept losing minutes. The next time he was in charge of himself again, the clock was half an hour later on the nightstand, and the bottle of liquor was half empty. He came to, staring sideways off the bed at the nightstand. His vision swam and settled on a pair of sunglasses. Oh, God, there was a pair of sunglasses. Aziraphale moaned, a weak sound in the dead night around him. There were no lights on, save for the full moon shining through the window. Aziraphale turned over with great effort, limbs drastically outsized for his body all of a sudden, and groped for a pillow. He pulled it to his chest and tried to open his eyes, but the alcohol in his system made it nearly impossible to find any kind of mental purchase on his body.

The pillow was there, though, and Aziraphale let his head come to rest nestling alongside it, breathing shallowly as he imagined holding someone. He couldn't even remember what he had been drinking about, but he could imagine that this was Crowley, and he was just off to Wales to pull some more cheap wiles, and Aziraphale was house-sitting for the week. He imagined, and nearly let himself believe, that he could feel the pillow's chest rise and fall, feel the strong heartbeat under his palms. Aziraphale drifted, some time around four o' clock in the morning, into fitful sleep, haunted by dreams of death and blood and an unimaginable loss.


	2. Anger

If it was possible, the morning was even worse than the night. Aziraphale awoke with a pounding headache and a crumpled pillow in his arms. It all came flooding back to him with a nauseating jolt, as he remembered the airbase and the alcohol and the hours in between. He stared bleary-eyed at the glasses on the nightstand with an emptiness so deep and cold he feared that it would swallow him whole. Then with a sudden motion and a wave of nausea, he clumsily swept the sunglasses off the table. He wished they would have shattered, but the rims held firm and they only clattered sadly on the ground.

Aziraphale was immediately overcome with a wave of regret, and he pushed himself upright with an enormous effort. The sunlight threatened a migraine if he didn't close his eyes, so Aziraphale yanked the blinds closed and sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes screwed shut, thinking. He searched for some recollection of what to do if the plan went south, if something like this happened, but he couldn't come up with anything. This was never supposed to happen—it was unimaginable. After a long while, he gave up and just walked out into the apartment.

Aziraphale opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the living room. He had been ignoring the burning pain behind his eyes and in his throat that he knew would make him cry if he lost even the slightest bit of resolve, and he intended to keep doing just that until the dam broke. He took one step, another, and then Aziraphale's will shattered like glass.

Past the kitchen, past the throne, past the hallway and the plants, the eagle lectern lay tenderly on a marble pedestal. Good and evil wrestling, Crowley had told him it was. Aziraphale threw up an arm to steady himself against the wall, but it did little good. It was as though he was outside his body, watching himself and the two figures in the stone. The first time he had seen it, they were in the church. The war was nearly over, but there was still Heavenly work to be done on Earth, and so Aziraphale found himself on hallowed ground once more, held up at gunpoint by three Nazis. The rest of the night was a blur. Crowley, haloed by the blue moonlight cascading over him through the rose windows. The whistle of the bombs overhead. The sensation of the rubble falling around him and yet, not a piece even grazed his skin. Aziraphale had felt three lives snuffed out. Oh, God, he had felt their souls burning on the way down. And his reflection in Crowley's sunglasses, two jet mirrors to his own black soul. Aziraphale saw the love in him bloom as surely as he felt it, and he was gone. He knew in that moment that he would love Crowley to the ends of the Earth. He knew that he had done it truly, and he had loved Crowley until the very end. He had died knowing that he was not alone, never alone.

But Aziraphale was alone now, and the emotion crushed him until he was gasping on the floor. In six thousand years, he had never been alone like this, and it was as though there was ice in his throat, in his stomach, in his very heart. It burned cold and awful in him, and Aziraphale lay fallen on the stone floor of his most intimate companion. Evil had triumphed, indeed, but for the price of another heart.

Aziraphale knew not how many minutes passed before he sat up again, combing his fingers through his matted curls and smearing his hands against his cheeks to keep the tears at bay. Eventually he forced himself to stand, although he buckled on his feet. Slowly, Aziraphale made his way over to the window and looked out at the bleak day, the gray sky overhead, and the cars at the curb. Then Aziraphale noticed something with a start.

The Bentley was outside, as pristine as the day it left the factory. Aziraphale choked and pressed his palms up against the window. How could it be? He had just seen it destroyed, blackened and twisted beyond repair. Aziraphale suddenly realized that this was the world, restarted. And if the Bentley was restored… He hoped beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, Crowley would swing open the door and saunter up to his apartment. Aziraphale waited with bated breath for a full minute, but as the seconds dragged onward and the car remained lifeless, a leaden hand crushed his heart again like a vise, dragging it down into his stomach. His hands slid down the windowpane, leaving streaks on the glass. He would have felt guilty for it, for making Crowley clean them, but any semblance of thought was utterly and completely beyond him. The only thing Aziraphale had left was the terrible truth that Crowley had been taken from him.

Aziraphale did not eat. He didn't clean his clothes. He left his coat lying on the floor of Crowley's bedroom. Without really any driven thought of any kind, he left Crowley's flat and locked it carefully and walked out to the car.

It was there, just as perfect as the morning before. He saw himself approach in the sleek black paneling, but he didn't feel it, not really. His whole body twitched like a live wire, anxious in a way he didn't understand or know how to channel. With a gesture at his side, the doors unlocked. Aziraphale lifted one reverent hand to the chrome handle and pulled it open. He had never sat on this side. He had never had to drive.

He sat down in the seat, grimacing with barely-kept-at-bay pain as he found that Crowley's seat was just how he left it, with extra space for his long legs. He wished that he had never come to the car, never even opened the door. It was all too real, too recent. It was only yesterday that they had been driving together. But yesterday was so far away now.

The car spluttered to life and the car vibrated under him, ready to leave this place. The keening of the engine sounded mournful to Aziraphale, the only dirge that the Universe would sing for his demon. Somebody to Love opened up on the speakers and Aziraphale's heart nearly gave out for the second time in an hour. With a shaking hand, he turned down the volume, but Aziraphale let it play on in the background if not for comfort then for continuity. If only because he could not bear to turn it off.

Aziraphale, shaking, put the car into gear and nearly lost control again as memories of Crowley's hands on the gearshift, practiced and strong, availed him. The two of them, cruising down the two-lane blacktop of the English countryside, Queen blaring and that Freddy Mercury smile on his face. Rain pouring down the windows but the warmth of the car reassuring him that nothing could go wrong. The pink lights outside the club and Crowley's offer. Telling him that he went too fast. Realizing now that Crowley could never have been too fast, that it was himself that was perpetually too slow. Tears ran down Aziraphale's face but he did not feel them. He hardly felt himself at all.

Indeed, nearly without realizing it, Aziraphale went through the motions on autopilot, allowing the car to guide him even more than he himself was driving—it knew the way. Before half an hour was up, the Bentley was rolling to a stop at the curb outside his bookshop, which looked exactly the same as always. It was too much that the world could keep on turning without Crowley, almost everything in its place except the demon who had hung the stars but would never be remembered in them. He had no recollection of arriving at the bookshop except for the memory of dull pain, dull vision, and the dull sensation of his hands on the wheel.

With another gesture, the car locked itself at the same moment that the doors of the shop clicked open, swinging quietly inward. The musty book smell, the sound of the bell above the door, even the creak of the third floorboard from the right doorjamb, it was all correct, but it was faded to Aziraphale. The relief in his heart for the bookshop's salvation was only a buoy on the wine-dark ocean of his grief, bobbing for a moment and then being relinquished to the storm. He moved forward in a fog, hearing only the rustle of his pants, stiff as they were with blood.

His bookshop was technically perfect, in every sense of the word. The shelves were organized exactly to his meticulous standards. There was not a single book waiting to be put back into place. The money-tables were all in order, down to the last cent. There were two wine glasses on the desk, exactly where they had left them. Aziraphale moaned in anguish.

He lifted one trembling hand to the shelf above and ran it slowly along the spine of his favorite Wilde, almost reverently. His fingers closed, shaking, around the cover and he withdrew it with a rasp from its dusty company. He breathed shallowly, unaffected by the old-book smell or the beauty of the yellowed pages. It was so perfect, so dear to him. This manuscript had never even seen the inside of a publisher's office. There would never be another one like it.

One hand supported the book, one gently opened it. He lifted the cover page, inset with the lovingly hand-printed typeface. W I L D E 1994 was stamped onto the old paper. Aziraphale lifted one corner of the page as though it were a sacrament, and stared down at it blankly as he slowly ripped it out. He released a breath he didn't know he had been holding and let the page flutter to the floor. It was useless now, as worthless as the paper it was printed on. It landed on the floor like a butterfly with its wings torn off. No one would ever read it again.

The next page went, with the same ferocious silence burning through the shop. It joined its brother on the floor, and the next, and the next. Aziraphale was breathing heavily now, tearing through the delicate bindings without hesitation. He was grabbing fistfuls at a time, shredding the book like a wild animal. The tenderness in his eyes had long been replaced with a carnivorous energy, hungry for anything to take down with him. The Wilde first edition was quickly reduced to little more than kindling on the floor, and Aziraphale crushed the pages under his feet as he reached for another book.

A fury had been ignited in him that had never burned so low or hot before. It was a dense white glow that possessed him to destroy anything in reach that he had ever loved, and no book withstood his wrath that day. He snarled and ripped the very hearts out of his world-renowned collection of antique literature, pages flying up around him and dropping like doves shot dead in flight.

When the shelf before him stood empty, Aziraphale took up the handle of the heavy desk lamp and smashed it down on the wood. It left a deep gouge in the shelf, but Aziraphale swung again and again with manic intensity until there were only splinters handing off the nails that had held it up. He whirled around and annihilated another bookshelf, sending the hardcovers crashing to the ground. Aziraphale lost himself to the rhythm of destruction.


	3. Bargaining

The bookshop had been reduced to little more than rubble; it was hardly better than what it had been the night before. Aziraphale stood in the center of a great mangled circle of books, breathing heavily. He had red marks on his hands from swinging the lamp so violently, and dozens of papercuts all over. The lightbulbs overhead were smashed, filaments torn off and scattered on the floor amid the pages and the glass, and the bookshelves for nearly a meter around Aziraphale had been decimated. The wine glasses were the last to go, as he threw them down and stomped them underfoot, miserably realizing the irony of the matrimonial tradition.

If there had been onlookers, they would have seen a man covered in dried blood and ash screaming and weeping at the injustice of the sky with great white wings puffed out around him, hell-bent on destroying the full sum of his life's obsession, his entire earthly life's possession. They might have compared him to the Angel of Death. 

When at last Aziraphale's rage had burned itself to embers, all he felt was empty. Empty of love, of life, of anger at the unjust Universe. He found no joy, no retribution for having destroyed the bookshop, because it had not righted any wrong. Instead, Aziraphale found that the entropy of the Universe had only increased, and now he had cast off from the last safe harbor left to him on Earth. The bookshop was as good as gone, the car did not belong to him, and his heart was in pieces at the airbase. Aziraphale had nothing to his name but a sucking hollowness that filled him up and drove him on. As it seemed to him, there was no route left to take save one: prayer to a distant watchmaker that had long since abandoned Her craft.

With numbness in his very core, Aziraphale left the bookshop. He locked it tightly, left the shutters down, and intended never to return if not with Crowley by his side. 

Once more, the Bentley shuddered to life and Aziraphale took the wheel. He peeled away from the curb with a screech and took off through the streets of Central London with very little heed for pedestrian life. First, second, third, fourth, the car hurtled up through the gears without a hand on the shifter, growling along with a vicious snarl rolling out from the fender and a spray of gravel spitting out from its tires. The sea of cars on the M25 parted around the Bentley, miraculously avoiding innumerable scrapes to its gleaming black paneling. Aziraphale drove as if asleep, hardly noting the signs telling him that the cityside was turning into countryside and countryside into steep, windswept cliffs. For hours, he urged the car down the freeway, running as far and as fast from civilization as he could possibly manage. Aziraphale gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. Queen blasted out of the speakers, growing louder and louder as Aziraphale neared the beach. 

It had begun to rain on Aziraphale's drive to the coast, as cold and unrelenting as Heaven itself. After endless miles, he turned onto a gravel road and let the car rumble to a stop. Below him, the sea roiled around an inlet flanked by cliffs, the sand fighting the advances of the ocean as a match did the striking-paper. His shoes crunched on the gray sand as Aziraphale marched down to the water, staring obliquely out at the ocean with no real conviction that he could get in touch with anyone any longer, let alone God Herself.

The sky was afire with flashes of lightning cutting through the cloying blanket of purple clouds, so wide and eerie that they seemed to be without end. Aziraphale had never felt farther from Heaven. Rain poured down in torrid sheets, crackling on the sand so desperately that the very surface of the beach rippled with what looked like gunfire. The ocean had risen so far that it was lapping at Aziraphale's brogues, or perhaps the film of water over everything had obscured the boundaries between land and sea. For miles off the coast, even to the near horizon, there were no ships. They had all been grounded, or been run into the same cliffs that formed the treacherous coast of this part of England. Aziraphale felt no shred of sympathy for them; he was not their lighthouse any longer.

The beach was choked on either side by steep bluffs, nearly black in the foul light. The thin strip of sand was slowly being devoured by the howling sea, and to Aziraphale's right and left cruel whitecaps smashed into the craggy cliffside with a vengeance. The sound of it all was deafening, but Aziraphale could hardly hear a thing.

Aziraphale began in silence. It was foreign to him after so long, his hands brought up to his chest in prayer, but the motion was still a memory of his vessel. He pressed his fingers together to still their trembling, but the cold air nipped at them and threatened to tear them apart from one another. He breathed in once, twice, trying hard to ground himself so that he would not be lost in the coming storm. 

"Please," he attempted, and his voice was already breaking. Aziraphale realized that he had not spoken since he had left Crowley's side. "Please." He pressed his hands together more tightly and closed his eyes. "I need this to be undone. I need… I need the demon Crowley back." Aziraphale continued with his eyes closed. "God, hear me now. Just give me one more year on Earth with him. Take my wings, if you wish. Take my grace. Know that I loved him, God, and let me see him just one more time." There was no answer save the wailing of the wind and waves. Aziraphale opened his eyes and let his arms drop to his sides. 

"God! Hear me now!" Aziraphale raised his voice above the howling sea. "I have defied you, and loved a demon, and if you ever knew me as your child, forgive me. Forgive him! Bring him back to me for one more year, just one more day!" Aziraphale thought that his heart could not stand another instant of loneliness, but the infinite moment dragged on without reprieve. "Take me! Bring him back and take my wings! Let me die! Oh, God, let me die so that I might join him now!" Tears were streaming down Aziraphale's face. His eyes were wide and blank with grief. "Kill me, God, or help me, please! I will surrender my eternal grace to you if I could see him one more time. So help me, God! Kill me. Kill me!" Aziraphale dropped to his knees, fully sobbing. His head lolled backwards in anguish, but his hands dug desperately in the sand as if to find salvation there. Even as he looked to Heaven, Aziraphale clung to the Earth and all it had taken from him. Aziraphale wailed and beat the foamy sand in passion, but Heaven had closed its doors to him. With a shuddering breath, Aziraphale screamed his rage to the empty sky.

"Fuck the plan if this was meant to happen. Fuck the plan all the way to kingdom come!" Aziraphale howled into the thunder, voice drowned out by the crashing of the waves around him. He was wrong. Kingdom come had come and gone, and Aziraphale was alone. 

The cold water soaked his clothes and bleached from them the blood and oil, leaving only the salt and tang of iron. The storm raged overhead and Aziraphale wished for death.


End file.
